House Proud

Mies van der Rohe and Robert Venturi at three museums.

In 1954, when Phyllis Lambert, an aspiring architect and the daughter of Samuel Bronfman, the head of Seagram, was asked by her father to decide who should design his new headquarters on Park Avenue, she considered every big name from Frank Lloyd Wright to Le Corbusier to Louis Kahn. She chose Mies van der Rohe because, she wrote, “the younger men, the second generation, are talking in terms of Mies or denying him.” Forty-three years after the bronze-and-glass Seagram Building was finished and thirty-two years after Mies's death, they still can't stop talking about him. There is something about the purity of Mies's buildings, the Platonic perfection they aspire to, that generates awe, even in an age that has no interest in modernism's dreams. Mies's buildings look like the simplest things you could imagine, yet they are among the richest works of architecture ever created. Modern architecture was supposed to remake the world, and Mies was at the center of the revolution, but he was also a counter-revolutionary who designed beautiful things. His spare, minimalist objects are exquisite. He is the only modernist who created a language that ranks with the architectural languages of the past, and while this has sometimes been troubling for his reputation—it seems, falsely, easy to imitate a Mies building, in the same way it seems easy to knock off a Greek temple—his architectural forms become more astonishing as time goes on.

For a long while, Mies's legacy seemed defined less by his own buildings than by their awful progeny. The glass boxes on Third Avenue diminished the Seagram Building, or clouded its glory, anyway. Modern architecture made a mess of cities, and the architect who was the god of glass towers had to share some of the blame. But we have been through a full cycle now, not only of wretched modern skyscrapers in the nineteen-sixties and seventies but also of second-rate postmodern skyscrapers in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, those buildings that, in deliberate reaction to Mies's austerity, were sheathed in stone with lots of decoration. The aura of freshness that surrounds Mies these days comes, at least in part, from the authenticity of his buildings. They are not imitations, and they are not responses to something else, and they are not intended to make a rhetorical point.

It is finally possible to look at Mies with a clear head, and both Lambert, the founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and Terence Riley, the chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, where the Mies archive is housed, have done exactly that in a pair of exhibitions which, taken together, constitute the most complete survey of the architect's work ever produced. The two museums split the turf. “Mies in Berlin,” the exhibition at MOMA, tracks Mies from a house he designed as a twenty-one-year-old architect in Germany in 1907, through his years as the head of the Bauhaus, and ends in 1938, the year he fled Germany for the United States. (He was famously apolitical, and was not so much escaping persecution as leaving a place that clearly was inclined to give more work to Albert Speer.) The Canadian Centre exhibition, “Mies in America,” which has been mounted at the Whitney Museum in a simultaneous run with the Modern show (it will go to Montreal later), starts with his years as an eminent refugee in Chicago, where he designed the campus for the Illinois Institute of Technology, ran its architecture school, and before long became the philosopher-king of American modern architects.

Mies would seem to have been an odd man for that last role: his English was terrible, he wrote no books or significant treatises, he was more interested in building than in theorizing. Yet within a few years of his arrival in Chicago he had become the most powerful aesthetic force in American architecture after Frank Lloyd Wright. Mies lacked Wright's passion for keeping himself in the public eye, but he appealed to the corporate executives who commissioned buildings. By the late nineteen-forties, as Wright's career was waning, Mies was beginning to design high-rise apartment towers for real-estate developers. He had produced famous theoretical schemes for skyscrapers in Germany, but he had never managed to build much beyond some private houses and several portions of the huge Weissenhof housing project in Stuttgart. In America, he found businessmen who were willing to let him function in the real world. They must have mistaken him for a pragmatist. (Samuel Bronfman, for whom Mies designed what at the time was probably the most expensive office building ever built, had no such illusions, or lost them early in the game.) Mies was blunt, he smoked cigars, he didn't waste time rhapsodizing about the glories of architecture. His only real interest was in physical form, and he was fanatical in his search for ways to perfect it.

His obsessiveness led to a certain cultishness, and to the development of a group of Miesians who worked directly for him or, like the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, produced architecture in his mold. (The Skidmore firm was known as “Three Blind Mies.”) As Mies became more important, a party line developed about his architecture: it was simple, it was pure, it was utterly rational. According to the canon, his career was a progression toward higher refinement and exactitude. A corollary to this was the belief that his architecture was better than what was around it and, for that reason, owed very little to what was around it. Mies's buildings stood aloof as Mies himself stood aloof. “Less is more,” the master said, which explained everything.

The current exhibitions gracefully unravel the myths of Mies while doing no harm to his reputation. At the Modern, Riley and his co-curator, the architectural historian Barry Bergdoll, have turned up numerous early projects that show how Mies was connected to the cultural context of Berlin in the nineteen-twenties, and how his modernist vocabulary did not come to him in a moment of epiphany but grew gradually, poking its way at first into some early houses that could almost be mistaken for traditional German houses of the turn of the century. The most striking of these, the Riehl House, built for a philosophy professor and his wife near Potsdam in 1907, looks from the front like a two-story stucco cottage with a pitched roof and window shutters, but from the side it is almost abstract. A huge, plain gable overhangs a loggia, below which the land falls away, and the house appears to sit on a long, flat podium, with a sleekness that is prescient of the architect's later work. Although it was built when Mies was only twenty-one, in later life he was not interested in having been a prodigy. He discouraged Philip Johnson from including a photograph of the Riehl House in an exhibition of his work mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947—the first significant introduction of Mies's architecture to American audiences. By that time, both Mies and Johnson thought that the traditional elements of the Riehl House and his other early houses subverted his image as the consummate rational modernist, and together they began to construct the view of Mies that is more or less what prevails today.

The truth is that Mies's architecture isn't much more rational than Stanford White's. Mies was a romantic, and what he was romantic about was the notion of beautiful and serene modern buildings. He would do almost anything to make them look like temples of pure reason. Most of Mies's buildings were a lot more complicated than they appeared, and he was as willing as any other architect to indulge in ornament when it suited his purposes. If you look carefully at the Seagram Building, you see that its exterior isn't flat, but is lined with little I-beams between the windows. They aren't part of the structure. They were put there to provide texture and to make the building softer on the eye—Mies's version of classical moldings. On the sides of the Seagram, where the structural engineers had demanded solid concrete walls to stabilize the narrow tower against heavy winds, Mies covered the surface with marble, then placed a grid of bronze I-beams on top of the marble so that it would look exactly like the framing around the windows elsewhere in the building. This is fakery, and it is lovely.

Mies's American buildings have been studied to death, and, while there is nothing like the little-known Riehl house to discover here, the Whitney show does—or it did for me—alter the perception of Mies as an architect who hated cities. He did several groupings of towers in his career—the 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago, the Federal Center in Chicago, Dominion Center in Toronto, Westmount Square in Montreal—that are generally thought of as collections of boxes plopped down with no regard for the pattern of city streets around them. But, in fact, in each case the towers are arranged to create an open space at ground level that is magnificently proportioned—at once intimate and grand. The open space and the masses of the tower slabs are expertly balanced, with void playing off solid. And every one of these compositions seems entirely at peace with the old streets that surround it. Mies opens the streetscape up, but he doesn't destroy it. Just as the plaza in front of the Seagram Building strengthens rather than weakens Park Avenue (unlike almost every other plaza, which feels like a useless gash in the street wall), the public space in Mies's other large projects relates to the old urban fabric with respect and gentleness. If “Mies in Berlin” connects the architect's work to a broader cultural context, then “Mies in America” connects it more clearly than ever before to physical context.

Of all the architects who have tried to take Mies on, the one who got the farthest, in a way, was Robert Venturi, whose remark “Less is a bore,” in the opening pages of his 1966 book, “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,” became almost as famous as Mies's original line. Venturi's position was that Miesian abstraction had nothing to do with real life, and not a lot to do with the history of architecture, either, since the great architecture of the past was never as simple as Mies wanted his buildings to appear to be. And, while Mies's pristine objects might be beautiful, Venturi argued, they had little to do with the realities of our difficult and ironic time.

For at least a decade following the publication of his book, Venturi and his wife and partner, Denise Scott Brown, were the most important architectural thinkers in the United States, the people who, like Mies in the fifties, everyone else either followed or reacted against. When Scott Brown and Venturi, along with Steven Izenour, wrote “Learning from Las Vegas,” which argued that the commercial strip was to the United States what Baroque church façades were to Rome, they seemed to be deliberately provoking sanctimonious middlebrow good taste. But if Mies was the sort of architect who made real-estate developers think that they could elevate themselves by hiring him, Venturi and Scott Brown turned off the people who built major commercial and civic buildings. Their architecture is funky and élitist at the same time. They talk and write about popular taste, but for the most part they've built houses and cultural institutions for a sophisticated clientele.

Venturi and Scott Brown's home city of Philadelphia has never given them a major commission, unless you count the new building for the Philadelphia Orchestra, a project that they designed and lost to another architect, Rafael Viñoly, whose style was thought to have more appeal in the fund-raising department. Philadelphia is now making up for this with “Out of the Ordinary,” an elaborate retrospective of the firm's work, curated by Kathryn B. Hiesinger at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It is as important, in its way, as the Mies exhibitions, or the huge retrospective of Frank Gehry's work now on view at the Guggenheim. (With Gehry, Venturi, and Mies running simultaneously, this is the greatest summer for architectural exhibitions I can remember.)

The main part of the exhibition is a mix of models, drawings, and photographs. Venturi has always drawn beautifully, and it is wonderful to see his old sketches. There are a few special objects, including a full-scale reproduction of a big three-dimensional coffee cup that Venturi hung above the door of a restaurant he designed in 1962 and, better still, a full-size reproduction of the façade of the house that he designed for his mother, Vanna, in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia at around the same time. The façade, which you have to pass through to get to the part of the exhibition devoted to houses, is an exhilarating coup de théâtre. The Vanna Venturi house—pale green, with a split gable and simple moldings—may be the most famous American house by an American architect after Philip Johnson's Glass House. It is at once sweet and monumental, like a child's drawing of a house, but also a complex, subtle play on architectural history, with allusions to such masterworks as Blenheim Palace. It's a house with a subject: the image of a house. In the nineteen-sixties, when houses were either modernist boxes or replicas of traditional style, Venturi went off in another direction.

That direction eventually led to postmodernism, which Venturi and Scott Brown have come to disavow. I don't blame them, and not only because postmodern is now a term used mainly in the Sunday real-estate ads to describe McMansions. Venturi and Scott Brown are really modern architects, not postmodernists or historical revivalists. They didn't want to copy history, only to acknowledge it, and to weave allusions to other things into their work. They are modern Mannerists, really. Just as sixteenth-century Mannerists like Michelangelo distorted the elements of Renaissance architecture for greater effect, Venturi and Scott Brown play with modernism. They love thinness and lightness as much as Mies did, but for them thinness involves pictures of things. The quintessential Venturi object is his Chippendale dining chair, which looks like a cutout of a traditional carved chair with a pattern printed on it.

I don't think any other architects could have designed the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery in London, the firm's most sumptuous public building and perhaps the greatest essay in Mannerism of our time; or the checkerboard-fronted addition to Cass Gilbert's art museum at Oberlin College; or the Hôtel du Département de la Haute-Garônne, in Toulouse, France, a series of government buildings that constitute their largest built work to date. In each case, patterns in the form of traditional ornament are placed over sleek, modern surfaces, as if to proclaim both the importance of decoration and the futility of using it in the traditional, three-dimensional way.

Image is as important as reality to Venturi and Scott Brown, which isn't what you hear from traditionalists or postmodernists. It isn't even what you hear from Frank Gehry, who in some ways is a much more traditional architect than Robert Venturi. Gehry designs astonishing shapes, and they pack an emotional wallop. His work is easy to experience as something sensual, where Venturi is almost always cerebral. Gehry offers new shapes, and Venturi offers a wry take on old ones. No wonder Gehry is more popular.

Venturi could be called the most radical architect alive, however, just on the evidence of a project in the Philadel-phia exhibition that was never built, and has been almost forgotten—his prizewinning entry in a competition in 1967 for the National Collegiate Football Hall of Fame. He proposed what he called the “Bill-Ding-Board,” a shedlike exhibition structure set behind an immense electronic signboard that was to rise to twice the building's height. The signboard would continuously project images of classic football plays, while the interior would contain a display of football relics and more projections of film on the barrel-vaulted ceiling. Venturi maintained that this was an electronic version of the painted ceilings of Baroque churches.

Today, we talk about how cyberspace is changing the nature of built space, but this project, designed thirty-four years ago, is the first instance I know of in which an architect said, in effect, that the information is the building. Frank Gehry would never dream of doing such a thing. It's more in the line of Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio, the team of architects who have built a career on the creation of projects that blur the distinction between media and architecture, and who use technology to create new kinds of spatial perceptions. Venturi was there first. The technology wasn't really even ready for his idea in 1967. He envisioned making his electronic football plays with two hundred thousand light bulbs. Today, his billboard would look like a vast television screen.

In some of Venturi and Scott Brown's work, like the small, shingled houses the firm has built in Nantucket and Westchester County, the desire to play around with the idea of image recedes somewhat, and convention is tweaked more quietly. Most of the time, though, their architecture is a dance through history that embraces everything from hamburger stands to cathedrals. The exhibition in Philadelphia ends with a section designed by Venturi and Scott Brown themselves—a sort of coda but with a tone very different from that of the main galleries. The rest of the exhibition is a bit dry and academic, and this last part is exuberant. It has one billboard-sized wall displaying a series of Venturi and Scott Brown aphorisms (“Ugly & ordinary is better than heroic & original”; “The validity of clutter”; etc.) and another containing Venturi's take on “The Architect's Dream,” Thomas Cole's famous painting of an architect contemplating a perfect classical city. In Venturi's version, there are McDonald's arches, Coca-Cola signs, and screens that parade video collages of buildings he and Scott Brown have done and things they love (Stickley furniture, Beethoven, Thai food, pumpkins, Italian palazzos, eggplants). The rest of the exhibition hasn't misrepresented Venturi and Scott Brown, however. They view the world with irony, but they take their own work straight, without much humor. They don't acknowledge that an ironic commentary about popular style isn't the same as popular style. Mannerism was never taken up by the masses, and it is never going to be, no matter how brilliantly Venturi and Scott Brown reinvent it for our time. ♦